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Peter Howson was born in London of Scottish parents and moved with his family to Prestwick, Ayrshire, when he was four. He was raised in a religious family and the first ever painting he did was a Crucifixion, when he was 6 years old.[citation needed]

His work has encompassed a number of themes. His early works are typified by very masculine working class men,[2] most famously in The Heroic Dosser (1987). Later he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum of London, to be the official war artist for the Bosnian/Hercegovina under Serbian and Croatian aggression in 1993. Here he produced some of his most shocking and controversial work detailing the atrocities which were taking place at the time, like Plum Grove (1994). One painting in particular, Croatian and Muslim, detailing a rape created controversy partly because of its explicit subject matter but also because Howson had painted it from the victims' accounts. He was the official war painter at the Kosovo War for the London Times.[3]